Everything She Ever Wanted (56 page)

Jean could not understand Pat's vitriolic attack on her father; he had

always been so good to her.
 
Why was she savaging him I with her words

while he might be dying?

Pat complained about having to get up with him the night re he had

taken sick.
 
"It was two-thirty in the mornin and ,@: before 9

@iw wanted some ginger ale.
 
I took it to him, and damn him, he drink

it!
 
He decided he wanted half-and-half and I took him that."

Pat suddenly changed the direction of her conversation.

"I tollked with him about death-you know, about funeral arrangements

and all.
 
He said he wanted to be put away in a casket with a pink

satin sheet to lie on.
 
I've got his clothes all picked out.
 
Your boy

will be one of the pallbearers."

None of that sounded a bit like Paw, jean thought.
 
Pink satin

'indeed.

As Jean and Sherry walked down the front steps, Pat suddenly appeared

on the porch.
 
She leaned across the railing and said -flatly, "I hope

he dies."

"What did you say?"
 
jean breathed softly.

"I said I hope he dies."

Jean walked to her car, stunned.

On Tuesday, Paw Allanson's blood pressure dropped so low it barely

registered, but medication slowly boosted it back up.
 
He was a very

old man, but he was made of tough Georgia stock.
 
He remained in a deep

coma for a week, caught somewhere between living and dying.

jean was sitting by his bedside as he slowly regained consciousness on

Saturday.
 
"Do you recognize me?"
 
she asked, truly believing that he

would not.

"Sure," he grumbled.

"Who am I?"

"Jean," he said, as if she had taken leave of her senses.
 
Of course he

recognized her.

"How do you feel, Daddy?"

He looked at her.
 
"I think I'll be all right when I get over this

stroke.

"Is that what you think you had, Daddy?"

"Yes-I feel like I'm taking the flu too.
 
My legs ache me so bad.

Pat maintained her position that Paw Allanson was a dangerous man,

octogenarian or not.
 
She insisted that he had tried to kill his wife,

and that she had no idea what he might do next.
 
She had retained a new

attorney, Dunham McAllister, to work on Tom's latest appeal.
 
She had

also asked Paw's attorneys, Fred Reeves and Bill Hamner, to fight any

attempt Jean Boggs might make to become her parents'guardian.

Pat told McAllister that she feared for her life; she had in her

possession a document that made her very vulnerable.
 
McAllister

contacted the East Point police and informed the investigators that Pat

had overheard Paw give his attorneys a confession to the murders of his

son and daughter-in-law.
 
At the time, Pat had explained, Paw had

believed that he would not survive his heart attack.

McAllister was concerned about Pat.
 
If Paw remembered how much Pat

knew, and if he survived his current illness, her life was most

certainly in danger.
 
McAllister was very worried about Nona Allanson's

safety too, citing the alleged smothering attempt only a day or so

before Paw overdosed.
 
Pat had confided to the lawyer-just as she had

to Tedford-that Paw had treated her coldly ever since he had come home

from the hospital in February.
 
She could deal with that-he was an old

man and cantankerous-but it was far more than that.
 
When Paw tried to

run Pat off the road, she had been hampered by her weak leg and hip.

It was all she could do to keep from crashing into a tree or slipping

over a gully.

She told McAllister that she had received harassing phone calls asking

her where she had been, what she was doing, whom she had talked to.

She hinted that the old man had watched her constantly to see if she

would tell anybody about his confession.
 
If he thought she might, he

would kill her without warning.

McAllister's next meeting was with Bill Weller, the assistant D.A. who

had successfully prosecuted Tom Allanson.
 
If Paw's confession was

true, then Tom had been wrongly convicted.
 
Dunham McAllister handed

over what Pat had told him were her roughly typed recollections of "the

confession."
 
The actual confession was alleged to be in the possession

of Paw Allanson's attorneys.

Although such scenarios are common to TV courtrooms, they rarely happen

in real life: a convicted killer proved to be innocent after all,

exonerated when someone else confesses to the crime .
 
But it could

happen.
 
Maybe Tom Allanson was doing hard time for crimes he had not

committed.
 
But Paw Allanson a killer?

If the old man was guilty, he would certainly be one of the most

unlikely murderers ever to surface in Georgia.

On June 21, Investigator R. A. Harris of the Fulton County District

Attorney's Office went to the First Palmetto Bank in East Point.

According to Pat, officers of this bank had witnessed an notarize aw s

signature on a typed reduction of her own notes on the old man's

admission of murder.

An assistant vice-president of the bank, A. V. "Gus" Yosue, remembered

a rather odd incident.
 
A woman had come into his bank around six in

the evening on a Friday a few months back, asking if she could get some

papers notarized.
 
She had explained that all the other banks were

closed and that "Daddy"-her grandfatherdidn't want everyone knowing his

business anyway.
 
Yosue had never seen her before-or since, for that

matter.
 
"Daddy" was out in the car when the woman first came in, and

Yosue had explained that the old gentleman would have to come inside to

have his documents notarized.

Joyce Tichenor, the head teller of the First Palmetto Bank, told

Investigator Harris that Mr. Yosue had helped an elderly man to her

window.
 
He and his granddaughter had a stack of papers, and Tichenor's

cursory glance had told her they seemed to be some type of real estate

documents-warranty deeds and the likemost of them apparently standard

forms.

The woman, in her thirties and very attractive, had seemed most

solicitous of the old man.
 
She had pointed her finger at the bottom of

several pages, saying, "Sign this paper, Daddy," or "Daddy, sign here

on this line."

Tichenor had notarized the signatures.
 
She had no idea what the

documents really were; it was not, she explained, her busis to read

documents brought to her.
 
Neither she nor Yosue nes had read the

papers.
 
The elderly man had simply followed the directions of his

granddaughter, signing without question.

Pat had told Bob Tedford that Paw's attorneys held a white envelope

that contained vital information, but she had been tearfully hesitant

to say more.
 
Tedford wanted to see what was in that envelope.
 
The

East Point detective called Hamner and Reeves and asked if they had

such a document.
 
They did, and promised to meet Tedford with the

envelope in Paw A anson hospital room.

Bill Hamner had wrestled with the question of legal ethics and the

plain white envelope he had held, he thought, for old Mr.
 
Allanson.

Should he have come forward earlier?
 
Should he have waited longer?

Hamner explained that it was Pat Allanson who had brought the envelope

to his firm.
 
The envelope bore only a few words, scribbled in a shaky

hand: Mr. Walter Allanson plese don't open untill I pass out "I

thought it was sort of strange," Homner said, "but the envelope was

sealed.
 
I just stuck it in the file.
 
. . . I probably had the

confession six .

. . maybe eight weeks total.
 
. .

. Pat came up to the office one day.
 
. . . She said she had been

riding with 'Daddy' and he had tried to run the car into a tree.

He was driving and she was in the passenger seat, and he had tried to

hit the tree on the passenger side.
 
. . . [S]he grabbed the steering

wheel to keep him from hitting the tree, and she thought .
 
. . he was

trying to kill her, maybe.
 
She said this would tie in with the

envelope."

Hamner was a civil, not a criminal, attorney and he had urged her to

give that information to Dunham McAllister, who would better know what

to do about it.
 
Bill Hamner and Fred Reeves had reason to expect some

startling revelation in the envelope, but they had adhered to the

instructions on the front and hadn't opened it until old Walter

Allanson had truly "passed out" and slipped into his mysterious coma.

On June 24, Investigator Harris, Sergeant Bob Tedford, and George

Boggs, Jean's husband, went to Paw Allanson's hospital room to ask him

about his "confession."
 
Apparently Paw hadn't seen any version of his

so-called confession.
 
He was only ten days past a critical coma, but

he would have to read the confession before he could confirm or refute

it.

Paw was rapidly returning to his old self and was absolutely lucid now,

with a keen memory.
 
With his permission, Hamner gave Sergeant Tedford

the opened white envelope.
 
He showed it to Paw and asked him if he

remembered writing on it.
 
He nodded.
 
"Yeah.

I was cooking supper one night, and Pat came into the kitchen and told

me that my lawyers wanted me to write that on the envelope."

"Was there anything in it?"

Nope.

There was something in it now.
 
Five legal-sized sheets of paper on